TLDR: From now on all my work will be published at JamesColton.com instead of here. For the past few years, I’ve been maintaining two personal websites. The Noctrium has always been a dedicated horror site, but that meant I couldn’t use it to showcase any of my other interests. So I started the more general […]
Welcome to The Noctrium
Welcome to The Noctrium. Feel free to wander the dusty corridors of my dark art gallery or surrender your imagination to the pages of my ghost stories. Above all, enjoy your stay—and if you feel an icy touch on your back, fear not; my spectral tenants are friendly…for the most part.
How to Write Scary Ghost Stories that Terrify Your Readers
Fear is one of the hardest reactions to provoke in writing. Just flip through the pages of any ghost story anthology; how many of them are genuinely scary? It takes more than tortured groans, rattling chains, and a splattering of gore; anyone can do that. But the art of raising goose bumps? That is an […]
The Portal
For a brief period in my younger days, I owned a house in the heart of a rural village. My first house, in fact. It was a foreclosure, and therefore cheaply bought. Perfect for a young man just starting to make his way in the world. But the only feature relevant to this particular story […]
Experimentum Meum
I have never experienced the supernatural, but I know someone who has. Isn’t that always how it goes? In my case, it was a friend named Curtis. Curtis is a bookish fellow, by which I mean he’s the only person I know to have thoroughly exhausted the offerings of his local library. In fact, it […]
The Art of Fear: How to Write Scary Ghost Stories that Terrify Your Readers
Do you want to give your readers goose bumps? Do you want to inspire nightmares? In this book, I share everything I’ve learned from a decade of writing ghost stories, including: The Principles of Terror Discover the basic qualities that make something scary Learn how to apply the unknown, uncanniness, subtlety, and more to your […]
Pages of Dust, Volume IV
Cross the Threshold, If You Dare! In the dusty corners of reality, where the darkness refuses to be banished, nightmares lurk. They wait for the curious and unfortunate to stumble out of the well-lit paths of life. Beware, for in opening this book, you part the veil and slip into the realm of the dead. […]
Safe and Dry
Prologue September 2017 Tommy Nier wakes thinking it’s still the middle of the night. If he’d look at the clock above his dresser across the room, he’d know it was 6:59 a.m., but it’s been raining all night and the stormclouds have yet to disperse. The sky outside his window is charcoal and the voice […]
Him
by Shannen L. Colton I’ll never forget the first time I saw him. I say him, but I don’t really know. He resembles a man, but I’ve never seen his face. The first time I saw him, I thought I must have seen wrong. My son was young, only five months old; taking care of […]